One of the primary reasons for the re-promulgation in 1908 of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 was the rationalization and centralization of power within the hands of the state, namely the Committee of Union and Progress and the Ottoman parliamentary government. Central to the achievement of these CUP goals was the reform of the Ottoman criminal justice system. Beginning in earnest in 1911, the CUP led Ottoman Parliament enacted sweeping revisions to the 1858 Imperial Ottoman Criminal Code, created a centralized Ottoman Prison System, and commenced the most extensive prison reforms even undertaken within the empire. Based upon the records of Ottoman parliamentary proceedings, the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code, and the archival documents from the Ottoman Prison Administration, this paper briefly examines the development, proclamation, and implementation of these penal reforms. Attempts undertaken to reform these complex criminal codes were not new in 1911. New codes exhibiting a distinct European influence had been adopted and augmented over the course of the nineteenth century, beginning as early as 1840. Much of current scholarship characterizes these reforms as evidence of a general trend towards increasing secularization and Westernization of the Ottoman criminal justice system culminating with the complete abrogation of Islamic criminal law in 1917. I argue, however, that criminal legal reforms over the course of the late Ottoman Empire should not be interpreted as a secularizing process, but as a concerted effort by the central government to adapt Western legal practices to their established Islamic legal institutions in an attempt to rationalize and centralize power over criminal justice within the hands of the state. This was not the aping of Western criminal justice practices, but a calculated adoption and adaptation that ended up creating a new criminal justice dynamic unique to Ottoman modernity.